2:22:22

Is everyone a liar, a plant, an actor? It's impossible not to be hoodwinked and gaslit when everyone is increasingly becoming an agent of corruption.Who IS everybody now?! I've been wondering this forever, I know, but fraudulence is now THE essential question of our time.Here is Celia Farber in an interview with Paul Bell on on the corruptness of four of the self-declared Freedom Convoy's spokespersons—also central to the GoFundMe scandal.This story is so depressing and chilling, it's CINEMATIC.The problem is they have taught everyone--save a few--to be numb. To find security in manipulation, to take pleasure in falsenesss. To the point where no one can even tell the difference anymore. Dichter had me fooled, too, and I am a good judge of character normally, very discerning (it's part of my paranoia).You can't do the right thing if you're no longer a person who genuinely cares about people. You can't be free if everyone is lying to you--and to themselves.After rewatching Pakula's The Parallax View (1974) a few months ago, I've been thinking a lot about how it's clear to me now--in the Covidian age--that the movie is about being MK Ultra'd. Joseph Frady is an assassin who does not know he is an assassin. In other words, he has been brainwashed to THINK he is the hero/agent of the story rather than the villain--or interceptor. He does not own the narrative, the narrative owns him. That's why the film's brainwashing sequence (something both he and the audience is subjected to) is so brilliant and so pivotal. Frady thinks he is resisting something that he has not only already seen, but that he has been trained to think he is seeing for the first time--and therefore resisting. All of this makes the film very very sad to me because we are rooting for someone who does not know who he is. Whose mind and memories have been stolen and implanted. Someone we think is on our side. Someone who is doomed and leading us to our doom. That white light on the other side of the door Frady is running towards at the end of the movie--is it simply his programming or is it his final moment of epiphany and self-hood? Going against the narrative in Parallax View turns out to be an advancement of the narrative. That's what's so terrible about it. I didn't see that for many years. I see it now. That's the extent to which we are now being lied to and mislead. That's what the corruptness of figures of Dichter and others represent. Even the people on your side are on not on your side. Like Farber and Bell, I still believe the trucker movement is real. Or became real.As I said last night, the corruption and destruction of the individual is always worse--sadder--than the corruption of the government, which history has shown is programmed to be poisoned. Farber: "It has become virtually impossible to know what is real, unless you’re looking at a bird, or tree....Nothing is more disorienting than things, people, morphing before your eyes, changing identities, not being known. And this is the perpetual nausea of the age.The battle line is drawn and there is only one line now. Sovereign, merciful humans v Covid fanatics—Davos types, who speak “pandemic,” who speak catastrophism, and insist it has eclipsed all else ever built up by our combined civilizations and standards. They despise nations, borders, families, freedom (“far right,”) workers rights, children’s rights—they are the new Brutalists. Proud of their brutality.Call them that. There is no longer any use for 'Left and 'Right.' These are glue-trap terms now—they’re not descriptive.Nobody can remain neutral anymore. We should go back to history and look for patterns, for consolation and hope, in the one and only war, that always repeats: Repression (degradation) v. Freedom (dignity.)."Paul Bell:"It’s interlocking presumptions and deceptions and technology creating the lens through which we think we see phenomena that are not biologically occurring outside those technologies and manipulations."

Glenn Greenwald on the War on Dissent and the banishment from the financial system.

Tina Turner always makes me feel better. There's a sound the 80s had--of uplift and mystery. My father always balks at it and calls it fake. He laughed at everything I worshipped as a kid, always training me to see through it. His lessons are always in my ear. I know it’s true. God knows I have spent my life writing and thinking about it, critiquing it. But I also believe it was real. I dance to this song a lot. Its surge of chorus. An end credits song. Imagine Trudeau being defeated and hauled off as this song plays over the end of this terrible movie that won't end. Maybe that hope was just another lie the 80s sold to us. But maybe it was a lie that was still true. That wanted to be true. I can't know, as much as I want to know. I just know that it felt completely different to be alive then, and that that feeling was real. I was happy. A lot of us were. This song is not Turner's best--surely--but again, it has this: things can change quality that makes me want to jump up. Having that feeling--feeling that feeling--is deeply romantic. Sometimes that feeling, that quality, is better than "serious" art, which can lead to more cynicism, more taking for granted. You have to have a big open heart to let art change your life. That takes a lot of work on the viewer/reader's end. It's not a given. What I love most about music is it says what it means. Even if the singer doesn't mean it, or doesn't know how to mean it, or isn't ready to mean it, or isn't allowed to mean it (by the industry). I have a lot more to say about this, and I already have in my books, films, and articles. So for now, I'll just rejoice! Because I need to. Because I want to.